Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [84]
“But growing season here starts late, doesn’t it?”
“Not compared to Tibet.”
“Ah.”
Sucandra said, “Will you move out here with us, and build your treehouse?”
“I don’t know. I need to talk it over with Rudra.”
“He says he wants to. Qang wonders if he should stay closer to hospital.”
“Ah. What’s wrong with him, do they know?”
Sucandra shrugged. “Old. Worn out.”
“I suppose.”
“He will not stay much longer in that body.”
Frank was startled. “Has he got something, you know—progressive?”
Sucandra smiled. “Life is progressive.”
“Yes.” But he’s only eighty-one, Frank didn’t say. That might be far beyond the average life span for Tibetans. He felt a kind of tightness in him.
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said at last. “I mean, I’ll stay where he is. So—maybe for now I’ll just work on the treehouse, and stay in Arlington with him. If that’s okay.”
“That would be fine, of course. Thank you for thinking of it that way.”
Disturbed, Frank went up the hill to the copse of trees at the high point.
He walked around in the grove, trying to concentrate. They were beautiful trees, big, old, intertwined into a canopy shading the hilltop. Snow filled every crevice of the bark on their north sides. If only they lived as long as trees. He went back to his van and got his climbing and window-washing gear, and trudged back up the hill. It was sunny but cold, a stiff west wind blowing. He knew that up in the branches it would be colder still. He wasn’t really in the mood to climb a tree, and you needed to be in the mood. It was more dangerous than most rock climbing.
But, however, here he was. Time to amp up and ramp up, as they used to say in the window-washing business—often before smoking huge reefers and downing extra-tall cups of 7-Eleven coffee, admittedly—but the point still held. One needed to get psyched and pay attention. Crampons, linesman’s harness, strap around, kick in, deep breath. Up, up, up!
Eyes streaming in the cold wind. Blink several times to clear vision. Through the heavy lowest branches, up to the level under the canopy, where big branches from different trees intertwined. In the wind he could see the independent motion of all the branches. Hard to imagine, offhand, what that might mean in terms of a treehouse. If an extensive treehouse were to rest on branches from more than one tree, wouldn’t it vibrate or bounce at cross-purposes, rather than sway all of a piece, as his little Rock Creek treehouse did? An interference pattern, on the other hand, might be like living in a perpetual earthquake. Not good. What was needed was a big central room, set firmly on one big trunk in the middle, with the other rooms set independently on branches of their own—yes—much like the Swiss Family treehouse at Disneyland. He had heard it was the Tarzan treehouse now, but he wasn’t willing to accept that. Anyway the design was sound. He saw the potential branches, made a first sketch on a little pocket notebook page, hanging there. It could be good.
And yet he wasn’t looking forward to it.
Then he saw that the smallest branches around him were studded with tiny green buds. They were the particular light vivid green that was still new to Frank, that he had never seen in his life until the previous spring, out in Rock Creek Park: deciduous bud green. An East Coast phenomenon. The color of spring. Ah yes: spring! Could spring ever be far behind? The so-called blocked moments, the times of stasis, were never really still at all. Change was constant, whether you could see it or not. Best then to focus on the new green buds, bursting out everywhere.
Thoreau said the same, the next morning. Frank read it aloud: “March fans it, April christens it, and May puts on its jacket and trousers. It never grows up, but is ever springing, bud following close upon leaf, and when winter comes it is not annihilated, but creeps on mole-like under the snow, showing its face occasionally by fuming springs and watercourses.”
Rudra nodded. “Henry sees things. ‘The flower opens, and lo! another year.’ ”
Thoughts of spring came to Frank